Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...case," protested Director Alfred Hitchcock, 76. Even so, the pudgy film maker and his wife Alma ventured to the snowy slopes of St. Moritz, where he wanted to rest before finishing his latest film, Family Plot. The movie, he said cryptically, is "sort of a comedy-melodrama about a fake woman medium, an out-of-work actor and a chase after a missing heir who is also a kidnaper." Had he bothered even to sample the Swiss snow? "We spend most of our time sitting comfortably in the Palace Hotel, watching it all from behind the window...
...like losing a character in fiction they become more "relevant" and, sometimes, realistic. Today it is common to see such queasy subjects as abortion, incest, drug addiction and venereal disease meshing with the old, familiar workings of unhappy families. This produces the kind of intense melodrama rarely seen in the evening. Currently, The Young and the Restless is helping a woman through a mastectomy with almost excessive realism. All My Children recently took six months to describe a child-abuse case; How to Survive a Marriage (now defunct) introduced a precedent-setting seduction scene that ended up with the participants...
...reduction of personality to sex organs is the dynamic of skin flicks and soap op era. Sad to say, Williams wrote this Petit Guignol sideshow in the late '50s, soon after completing his masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Today it seems fatally misconceived, a sentimental melodrama instead of a savage, black comedy on southern mores...
...risk, an act of the highest artistic confidence. Reassurance comes in the strong melodrama of the film's second half. From the moment Marisa Berenson, playing Lady Lyndon, appears and Barry's suit for her hand succeeds, the film, without seeming to change its style or gently enfolding pace, gathers tremendous dramatic force of a quite conventional sort. Barry's loveless use of her to further his ambitions has a raw, shocking edge. His conflict with her son by her first marriage, culminating in what is surely the most gripping duel ever filmed, is full of angry...
...based on recent history. The events bear both the sting and the awkward com edy of truth. But unlike Z, a previous Semprun - Costa-Gavras collaboration based on the 1963 assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, a Greek politician, Special Section lacks the narrative drive that can make a good melodrama with political meaning. Instead, the film is a puppet show of moral indignation...